Search results for "Democracy"

The Challenge of Coexistence in Socially Vulnerable Schools

2017

Abstract Society in general and schools in particular continue to express their concerns with regard to the many challenges posed nowadays by living in a globalized world, where learning to coexist involves knowing oneself and those around us. Therefore, the professionals from the education sector and specially from the most vulnerable contexts demand the necessity to know strategies and initiatives which enable them to build a democratic school, where learning to coexist is the key to educate engaged citizens living in an increasingly intercultural, changing world. The study presented here has been conducted in two differentiated, but complementary, phases. During the first phase a documen…

The Impact of Regionalism on Democracy Building: An Examination of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

2017

Since the early 1990s, the world has witnessed a new wave of regionalism and a mushrooming of regional integration organizations, particularly in the global South. Focusing on Africa, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) ranks among the most promising examples of regionalism on the continent. The SADC explicitly aims at building and advancing democracy in the region and its member states as part of its broader agenda on regional development. From a political science perspective, there is general agreement that regional integration and parallel institution building can be useful measures to promote and strengthen democratic rule, since an appropriate institutional “lock-in” impl…

Comparing Freedom House Democracy Scores to Alternative Indices and Testing for Political Bias: Are US Allies Rated as More Democratic by Freedom Hou…

2014

AbstractSeveral scholars have criticized the Freedom House democracy ratings as being politically biased. Do countries indeed incorrectly receive better ratings that have stronger political ties with the United States? This article tests whether differences between a number of alternative indices of democracy and the FH ratings can be explained in a systematic manner by variables that record relationships between the US and the countries under investigation. Differentiating between the periods before 1988 and after 1989, strong and consistent evidence of a substantial bias in the FH ratings is obtained for the former period. For the latter period, the estimates are less consistent, but stil…

Corporealising a Healthy Democracy? Inequality, Bodies and Participation

2019

Socio-economic inequality is associated with differentiated levels of health and poor health affects political participation; inequalities are embodied in political life. This contribution, focusin...

2018

This article presents the experiences and problems of the Indonesian parliament, or DPR (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat), during the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one, in 1999–20...

Where Democrats Disagree: Citizens’ Normative Conceptions of Democracy

2017

While support for the essential norms of liberal electoral democracy is high in almost all developed democracies, there is arguably also a gap between democratic aspirations and democratic practice, leading to dissatisfaction among citizens. We argue that citizens may hold very different normative conceptions of democracy which are equally compatible with support for liberal democracy, but lead to different expectations where institutional design and democratic practice are concerned. Satisfaction with democracy may thus depend on congruence between such normative conceptions and institutionally entrenched norms. Drawing on survey data from Germany with a comprehensive item battery on attit…

The consequences of supply gaps in two‐dimensional policy spaces for voter turnout and political support: The case of economically left‐wing and cult…

2019

Parties with left-wing positions on economic issues and right-wing (i.e., authoritarian) positions on cultural issues have been historically largely absent from the supply side of the policy space of Western European democracies. Yet, many citizens hold such left-authoritarian issue attitudes. This article addresses the hypotheses that left-authoritarian citizens are less likely to vote, less satisfied with the democratic process and have lower levels of political trust when there is a left-authoritarian supply gap. Using data for 14 Western European countries from the European Social Survey 2008 in the main analysis, it is shown that left-authoritarians are less likely to vote and exhibit …

El diagnóstico de la crisis de la cultura en España: del recorte público a la crisis sistémica

2016

Since its invention in the fifties, cultural policy has been subject of analysis and reflection by Social Sciences. However, Spain, due to Franco period, has a number of distinguishing features as compared to Western European democracies. With the restoration of democracy, Spain acquires the dominant paradigm of a democratic cultural policy based on freedom, pluralism and the right to culture. However, after decades of democratic governments, diagnosis of cultural policy in Spain shows signs of systemic crisis, added to the impact of the global financial crisis at the beginning of the XXI century. In this context, scholars, using the Delphi method along with secondary sources, identify a se…

India’s Turn to Rights-Based Legislation (2004–2014): A Critical Review of the Literature

2018

This article surveys the academic literature on rights-based legislation and critically discusses key findings and arguments that emerge from this literature. I conduct this survey and discussion in light of a wider understanding of the political economy of Indian democracy as resilient but limited in terms of substantial forms of redistribution and recognition in favour of subaltern groups. This contradiction has arguably become especially pronounced in the context of neoliberalisation, where, despite the active participation of the poor in electoral democracy, socioeconomic inequality has reached dramatic heights, and I discuss rights-based legislation as a response to this. In conclusio…

Mass data gathering and surveillance: the fight against facial recognition technology in the globalized world

2020

The growing use of facial recognition technologies has put them under the regulatory spotlight all around the world. The EU considers to regulate facial regulation technologies as a part of initiative of creating ethical and legal framework for trustworthy artificial intelligence. These technologies are attracting attention of the EU data protection authorities, e.g. in Sweden and the UK. In May, San Francisco was the first city in the US to ban police and other government agencies from using facial recognition technology, soon followed by other US cities. The paper aims to analyze the impact of facial recognition technology on the fundamental rights and values as well as the development of…